For years, the Ein Harod kibbutz has thrived in the Jezreel Valley, a fertile plain in northern Israel still scarred by the shocks that accompanied the creation of the Jewish state. On a hill overlooking the kibbutz are the ruins of a Palestinian village which, like others in the area, was destroyed in 1948.
Now, Ein Harod, an emblem of early Zionism for Israelis, has become an unlikely home for stories of Arab loss in the valley, told by a family of Palestinian artists whose parents and grandparents were forced to leave their own village near the kibbutz.
An exhibition at the kibbutz art museum features the works of five members of the Abu Shakra family and has struck a chord with Israelis, as well as Arabs, trying to understand the traumas suffered by Palestinians.
The exhibit, “Spirit of Man, Spirit of Place,” has drawn a record crowd to the small museum, nearly 100,000 since it opened in November. A program built around the exhibit brings together Jewish and Arab children.
The works include paintings of the nopales that marked the boundaries of Palestinian villages and were adopted by the Zionists as a symbol of their own identity. A video installation shows a Palestinian matriarch in her final days sharing memories of her loss. Intricate embroidered pieces are splashed with red, representing the violence that has long gripped the region.
The project was originally proposed by Said Abu Shakra, 67, during a spasm of Arab-Jewish mob violence two years ago. He explained that his goal was to generate empathy between Arabs and Jews. “I want a dialogue with the Jews in Israel, but a dialogue of equals,” he said.
The exhibition comes at a tense time, as generational, social and demographic changes have deepened the rifts in Israel. It has also coincided with the rise of the most right-wing government in Israeli history, which includes members with a record of anti-Arab racism.
Galia Bar Or, who curates the show together with Housni Alkhateeb Shehada, a Palestinian-Israeli art historian, said the project “is built on respect and recognition of the pain of the other.”
The story highlighted in the exhibit is the event that transformed the landscape surrounding the kibbutz—the creation of the Jewish State of Israel 75 years ago. Palestinians mark the event as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” referring to the expulsion or flight of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages in what is now Israel.
Relations between the Jewish and Arab communities in the Jezreel Valley area today are mostly cordial. But scars from 75 years ago are still visible. The remains of Qumya, one of the evacuated villages, looms over Ein Harod.
As the fighting raged in 1948, Abu Shakra’s mother, Mariam, and her family fled to a Palestinian farming village, Umm al-Fahem. Today that village has grown into a working-class city that stretches into the hills several miles west of the Jezreel Valley.
Walid, the eldest of Mariam’s seven children, worked as a clerk in the coastal town of Hadera. The Jewish family who rented a room from him saw one of his drawings and urged him to pursue art. He in time became a full-time artist, creating paintings and engravings of the evocative landscape around Umm al-Fahem.
He passed away in 2019, but his art has inspired other members of the family. The installation of his younger brother Said with his mother sharing the last memories of him is one of the main attractions of the retrospective at Ein Harod.
When Said proposed holding the exhibit at the kibbutz, the museum agreed without hesitation.
“For me, the mission was crystal clear,” said Orit Lev-Segev, the museum’s director. “Create a better reality here.”
ISABEL KERSHNER
The New York Times
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6820983, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-07-26 20:40:07
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